It was only in 2002, after the Maltese scholar Keith Sciberras had taken the initiative of X-raying some of those obscured pages, that the truth was revealed.74 The painter had indeed become embroiled in an altercation with ‘a noble knight’, just as Bellori had indicated. Baglione turned out to have been right too. The aggrieved party was indeed a Knight of Justice, Fra Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, the Conte della Vezza. He was seriously injured in the incident.
One of several documents thus uncovered was a report of the preliminary results of an enquiry ordered by Grand Master Wignacourt and the Venerable Council on 19 August 1608. The purpose of that enquiry was to outline the events of a ‘tumult’ that had taken place the night before. The incident had involved several knights, some of whom had smashed open the door of the residence of the Organist of the Conventual Church of St John, Fra Prospero Coppini.
As a result of that preliminary enquiry, a criminal commission was set up to investigate the incident in more detail. The three investigators were Fra Philiberto de Matha, Fra Giovanni Gomes de Azevedo and Antonio Turrensi. They established that a brawl, involving seven knights altogether, had broken out in the house of Fra Coppini, but since he himself had not taken part, he was absolved. The commission found that Fra Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, the Conte della Vezza, had been the victim of an assault by six aggressors, including Caravaggio.
The artist’s companions on the night in question included two senior figures in the Maltese hierarchy, both Knights of Justice like the victim, Roero. One was Fra Giulio Accarigi, who was originally from Siena but who had been a Knight of Malta since 1585. He had a reputation for violence and a criminal record to match, having spent two months in detention for assault in 1595 and a further two years in jail some ten years later. The other Knight of Justice involved was Fra Giovanni Battista Scaravello, from Turin, who had arrived on Malta in 1602 and had entered the Order of St John two years after that.
Two young novices were also implicated: Francesco Benzi, who had come to the island in 1606; and Giovanni Pecci, from Siena, who had arrived on Malta within a day of Caravaggio himself, on 13 July 1607. Both men would have known the painter as a fellow novice. One of the conditions of entry to the order was a rigorous programme of training in the selfsame Oratory of St John – also known as the Oratory of the Novices – for which the artist had painted his altarpiece of The Beheading of St John. Benzi and Pecci would have prepared for their knighthoods alongside Caravaggio.
No eyewitness description of the fight has been found in the Maltese archives, so the parts played by those involved have to be deduced from the punishments each received. Accarigi and Scaravello seem to have taken minor roles. Each would eventually be given six months in jail, a relatively mild sentence in the harsh context of Maltese justice (although it is also possible that they were let off lightly on account of their rank). Benzi and Pecci were condemned to two and four years in prison respectively. The main culprits appear to have been Caravaggio himself and a certain Fra Giovanni Pietro de Ponte, who was a deacon of the church, and another frequent offender.75 De Ponte was identified by the criminal commission as a prime mover of the assault. On the night of the fight he had been carrying a small pistol referred to as a sclopo ad rotas. It was a bullet or bullets from the sclopo that had inflicted serious wounds on Roero. De Ponte would be defrocked, deprived of his habit and denied forever his status as a Knight of Malta. Caravaggio was never sentenced for his part in the assault, for reasons that will become clear. But his crime was clearly deemed to be at least as serious as that of de Ponte, because the first report of the criminal commission into the case recommended that these two – but none of the others involved – be arrested immediately.
That report was submitted to the Venerable Council, whose members included Alof de Wignacourt, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, Antonio Martelli and Ippolito Malaspina, on 27 August 1608. Present too would have been Wignacourt’s secretary, Francesco dell’Antella, for whom Caravaggio had recently painted the Sleeping Cupid. But Malta’s strict code of discipline, and the seriousness of the assault on the Conte della Vezza, would have given the artist’s patrons and supporters no choice but to order his immediate arrest. On 28 August 1608 Caravaggio was seized and imprisoned within the forbidding precincts of the Castel Sant’Angelo.
The timing of his offence could not have been more perversely precise. Caravaggio had managed to get himself thrown into jail on the eve of one of the most important days in the calendar of the Knights of Malta: 29 August was the Feast of the Decollato, the day on which the order gathered in the Oratory of St John to remember the decapitation of its patron saint. In 1608, it was also the day Wignacourt had chosen to unveil Caravaggio’s monumental altarpiece of The Beheading of St John. But instead of attending in his knight’s robes, the painter now languished in an underground cell.
The ‘tumult’ cast a long shadow over the celebrations of the feast of the Decollato. To make matters worse a dispute had arisen between the confraternity responsible for arranging those celebrations, the Compagnia di San Giovanni Decollato, and the musicians of the Conventual Church – including, coincidentally, Fra Prospero Coppini, the organist whose door Caravaggio had helped to kick in. The musicians were unhappy about their pay and most of them went on strike, so that on the feast day itself neither Vespers nor the solemn Mass was sung in the oratory before Caravaggio’s picture. The unveiling for which Wignacourt had planned so carefully could hardly have gone more badly wrong.
‘A ROTTEN AND DISEASED LIMB’
Caravaggio spent the entire month of September detained in the guva, an underground cell cut directly into the rock of the Castel Sant’Angelo. It is a bell-shaped chamber, eleven feet deep, sealed by a heavy trap door, and reserved for knights who had been guilty of serious offences. The traces of their presence remain in the form of several melancholy graffiti, one of which records the last-known words of a sixteenth-century Scottish Knight of Malta, one John Sandilands: ‘imprisoned forever, victim of evil triumphing over good – so much for friendship’.76
Caravaggio’s own thoughts were less mournful and more pragmatic. Few had ever broken out of the Castel Sant’Angelo, while escape from the guva itself was unheard of, but he was determined to do so. Even if he could scale the walls of the rock-cut cell, he would then need to climb the ramparts of the castle itself. After that he would have to lower himself down a sheer 200-foot precipice to the sea. To do all this he would need help.
Getting off Malta itself would pose a whole tangle of other problems. Caravaggio would need a boat, skippered by a brave and corruptible captain. But the boat would be unable to collect him at the bottom of the castle cliff, because the only way to the open sea from there lay through the narrow opening of Valletta’s Grand Harbour. Any vessel attempting to escape by that route would certainly have been spotted by the order’s patrols. The journey would have to be made from one of the island’s many small bays, and by night, to avoid detection. This meant that Caravaggio would have to swim round the promontory on which the Castel Sant’Angelo stood, then make his way to a quieter part of the island by foot, to wait for the vessel skippered by his accomplice. From there, the most logical destination would be Sicily, the nearest part of the mainland, some sixteen hours away with a favourable headwind.
Somehow, Caravaggio did indeed manage all of this. By the end of October 1608 he was in the Sicilian port town of Syracuse, some sixty miles from Malta. Bellori describes the artist’s great escape in a single terse sentence: ‘In order to free himself he was exposed to grave danger, but he managed to scale the prison walls at night and to flee unrecognized to Sicily, with such speed that no one could catch him.’77 Baglione adds that a rope ladder was used in Caravaggio’s escape, but neither writer makes any suggestions about who might have helped his getaway. He must have had help from someone on the inside in the Castel Sant’Angelo, but who that someone was remains a mystery.
Caravaggio was officially declared missing on 6 October, when
was heard the complaint of Lord Brother Hieronymus Varays, Procurator for the Treasury of the Order, made against brother Michael Angelo Marresi [sic] de Caravaggio who while detained in the prison of the Castle of St Angelo fled from it without permission of the most illustrious and most exalted Lord the Grand Master and departed secretly from the district, against the form of the Statute 13 concerning prohibitions and penalties: the most Illustrious and most exalted Lord the Grand Master and Venerable Council commissioned the Lord Brothers Joanni Honoret and Bladius Suarez that, through the agency of the Master Shield-Bearer, they should see that all due diligence is shown in finding out the said Brother Michael Angelo and in summoning him to appear, and should gather information about his flight …78
There is a strong implication here that an expeditionary force was sent to recapture Caravaggio and render him up to the Maltese court to face sentence both for the assault on the Conte della Vezza and for his defiance in fleeing the island. The Grand Master was known to be extremely severe on knights who transgressed Statute 13 of the order’s legal code by leaving Malta without his permission. He insisted that all fugitives be returned to Valletta at once, preferably in secrecy. It was his normal practice in such cases to write to all the order’s receivers in the major cities and ports of Europe to demand the immediate detainment of the renegade knight.79 Yet seven weeks later Caravaggio was still at large in Sicily, having evaded whatever attempts had been made to rearrest him. On 27 November, his trial on Malta went ahead in his absence. The Venerable Council determined that he had escaped from prison using ropes. It decided to disgrace him and deprive him of his habit. At the same time, the council heard and passed judgement in the case of the August assault. Four of the six guilty knights were sentenced to jail terms, while the church deacon, Giovanni Pietro de Ponte, was to be defrocked like Caravaggio.
According to Maltese custom, criminal trials and ceremonial punishments were carried out in the Oratory of St John, where Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John now hung directly over the main altar. So four days after the trial, on 1 December 1608, the ritual defrocking known as the privatio habitus took place in that very room. The archive records that ‘a General Assembly was summoned of the Venerable Bailiffs, the Priors, Preceptors and Brothers in the Church and Oratory of St John our patron, at the sound of the bell, according to the ancient and praiseworthy custom of the Holy Order of St John of Jerusalem … the information inspected and carefully read out against Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio …’80
Wolfgang Kilian’s mid seventeenth-century engraving of a criminal trial on Malta conjures up the scene of Caravaggio’s privatio habitus. On either side of the Oratory of St John sit the massed ranks of the order’s Grand Crosses. In December 1608 they would have included not only the artist’s most prominent patrons such as Antonio Martelli, but also many other veterans of the great sea and land battles of recent European history – survivors of the Great Siege, of Lepanto, perhaps even the Spanish Armada. Before this assembly of heroes, Caravaggio’s greatest humiliation was to take place.
In Kilian’s engraving (see p. 328), the Grand Master sits, just as Alof de Wignacourt would have done, at the near end of the church. At the far end, the guilty knight kneels, directly beneath Caravaggio’s depiction of St John’s decapitation. Because Caravaggio was to be defrocked in absentia, a wooden stool draped with the habit of a Knight of Magistral Obedience would have been placed at the altar end of the church – more or less directly beneath Caravaggio’s own signature, flowing in blood from the neck of John the Baptist.
Before the conclusion of the ceremony, there was one last formality to be gone through: ‘The Lord Shield-Bearer … repeated in a loud voice in the Public Assembly so that the said Brother Michael Angelo de Caravaggio being personally summoned once, twice, thrice and a fourth time, an abundant notice, did not appear nor as yet doth he appear …’ The oratory fell silent for the brief, necessary moment of Caravaggio’s inevitable non-appearance. Then the robe of a Knight of Malta, so proudly but so briefly worn by him, was stripped from the stool by Grand Master Wignacourt himself, and the last damning words were written in the record: ‘the said Brother Michael Angelo de Caravaggio was in the Public Assembly by the hands of the Reverend Lord President deprived of his habit, and expelled and thrust forth like a rotten and diseased limb from our Order and Society.’81
THE BURIAL OF ST LUCY AND A BLACK DOG CALLED CROW
Caravaggio was on the run for the second time in his life. His destination was the port town of Syracuse at the western edge of Sicily, where his old fellow apprentice, Mario Minniti, had established a thriving studio. Minniti had contacts in the town Senate. If they could be persuaded to look favourably on Caravaggio, they had the power to protect him from Maltese law. He had never been in more trouble than now. This time he had managed to alienate his entire network of supporters, not only the Colonna and their allies, who had manoeuvred to get him to Malta, but also the formidable Alof de Wignacourt and his army of knights. Caravaggio desperately needed some new friends in high places.
There is evidence that he took a deliberately circuitous route, landing at one of the island’s smaller and more southerly ports, such as Pozzallo or Scicli, before working his way north-east. En route, he stayed in the little town of Caltagirone, some sixty miles inland from Syracuse. A recently rediscovered eighteenth-century document records that Caravaggio was seen visiting a church there, Santa Maria di Gesù. He was impressed by the beauty of a sixteenth-century marble Madonna by Antonello Gagini on one of its altars. ‘Whoever wants her more beautiful, should go to heaven,’ he reportedly said.82 Caravaggio was continuing to measure himself, as he had done throughout his life, against the standard of Michelangelo and his school: Gagini had been one of Michelangelo’s most gifted pupils, and was said to have assisted the sculptor on his final version of the tomb of Pope Julius II, in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli.
As the painter made his way from Caltagirone to Syracuse, he found himself once more within a realm ruled distantly by Philip III of Spain. The island had been praised for its warm climate and natural abundance since antiquity, but under the Spanish the majority of its people suffered great privations and hardship. Part of the reason was Spain’s own economic crisis, caused by the sudden dwindling of its vast revenues from the silver mines of Latin America, under the pressure of competition from other European nations. A succession of Spanish viceroys in Sicily were encouraged to bleed it of its natural resources. The people became poorer as their rulers enriched themselves, concealing the true nature of this unequal transaction behind the grandest of architectural façades. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, cities such as Syracuse, Messina and Palermo became stage-sets for the performance of the rituals of absolute Spanish power. Splendid new churches and palaces were built in an extravagant local version of the Baroque style. Grand axial routes were ruthlessly cut through the fabric of Sicily’s medieval cityscapes, distracting attention from the miserable lot of the poor, and allowing the rich to move serenely through each city without ever seeing its warren of slums.
Travelling to Syracuse by land from the southern tip of Sicily was the best way of avoiding the pursuing knights, but Caravaggio exposed himself to other risks. Such was the discontent with Spanish rule that by the early years of the seventeenth century much of the island’s interior had degenerated into lawlessness, with many regions at the mercy of competing clans of banditti. The Spanish authorities had retaliated against these roaming gangs with a degree of success, but travel in the rural hinterlands of Sicily was still considered dangerous by George Sandys in 1615: ‘This Vice-Roy hath well purged the country of Bandities, by pardoning of one for the bringing in or death of another: who did exceedingly, and yet do too much infest it. Besides, the upland inhabitants are so inhospitable to strangers, that betweene them both there is no travelling by land without a strong guard; whom rob and murder whomsoever they can conveniently lay hold on.’83 Despite the
dangers, Caravaggio made it to Syracuse safely around the middle of October 1608.
The main source of information about Caravaggio’s activities in Sicily is a manuscript of 1724 entitled The Lives of the Messinese Painters, written by a priest and amateur painter called Francesco Susinno. Susinno’s sources were in the painters’ studios of Sicily, where memories of Caravaggio’s unprecedentedly emotive style of painting and perplexing personality were still strong more than a century after his death. In Susinno’s words, Caravaggio ‘was welcomed by his friend and colleague in the study of painting, Mario Minniti, a painter from Syracuse, from whom he received all the kindness that such a gentleman could extend to him. Minniti himself implored the Senate of that city to employ Caravaggio in some way so that he could have the chance to enjoy his friend for some time and be able to evaluate the greatness of Michelangelo, for he had heard that people considered him to be the best painter in Italy.’84
A commission from the Senate would mean protection from the Knights of Malta. The knights maintained an active presence in Syracuse, but so long as he was working for them, the city’s fathers would look after him. Once again, Caravaggio’s predicament would be his patrons’ opportunity. Once again, he would be given the chance to paint his way out of trouble.
Caravaggio Page 48